If you want to experience enthusiasm in its purest form, take a group of second graders out on a nature field trip. It’s like chaperoning a herd of puppies; they’re so excited they want to bite, sniff, taste and roll in it all.

Ken Baker(Photo: Submitted)

But all too soon they hit the mitosis/meiosis speed bump in a junior high science class and Mendelian genetics in high school before finally slamming into protein synthesis and Latinized taxonomy in a college biology course, if they get so far. Small wonder the fascination with living things that so fired them up as youngsters often fades as “hard science” intrudes on the simple joy of experiencing nature firsthand.

As usual, the problem is largely one of language: septate and coenocytic hyphae, dikaryotic ascocarps and basidiocarps, conidiophores, sporangiophores, zygosporangia and chytridiomycosis. Yipes! Did I really teach that stuff?

Well, yeah. But every prof knows that if you can somehow get the class to see past the names of things to the things themselves (the astonishing biology of fungi underlying the terms in the above paragraph, for example), they’ll discover the living world is 10 times— a hundred times — more breathtakingly compelling than they could have guessed.

But what’s the trick? How do you break through a person’s natural resistance to the unfamiliar and the complex? How do you catch students’ attention? How do you catch … them?

After some 38 years in the trenches, for me teaching biology has come to feel a lot like dry fly fishing for trout. In fly fishing, a lightweight, artificial “fly” is crafted to appear like a tasty food morsel for a (hopefully) hungry trout. No small part of the art lies in selecting an appropriate lure; fish preferences vary with the season, temperature, time of day, size of the fish, the river’s physical characteristics and the availability of various prey types.

Lures that float atop the water, tempting a trout to rise to the surface, are called dry flies while those that sink are referred to as wet. Especially when working a dry fly, you’ve got to know — or have a pretty good idea — where your target fish is likely to be and then deliver your cast with pinpoint timing and accuracy. You need a light touch for “mending” the cast so your fly floats easily and naturally with the stream’s current, and a plan for a follow-up attack if your first effort fails to entice a hit.

Once the hook is set, it’s game on. How you play out and draw in your line matters a ton; it’s all too easy to lose your focus ... the line connecting the two of you snaps and there you are, standing in your pricey Cabelas all alone in midstream.

… And there you are, standing at the lectern aimlessly waving a laser pointer at some corner of your carefully prepared PowerPoint slide detailing the exciting life cycle of a bread mold. The thread of discussion that had connected you to that kid in the third row from the back of the lecture hall … broken.

“Well, good morning!” Up on the big screen at the front of the room is the alluring title of the day’s entertainment: Survey of the Kingdom Fungi: Molds, Sac Fungi, Mushrooms, and Lichens.

“So perhaps you think the idea of studying the fungi lies somewhere on the boring side of dull?” (Did you see a fin break the water over by that boulder near the far bank?)

“OK then, let’s take three minutes to check out this clip from a BBC documentary on a group of killer fungi from the Amazonian rainforest.” (Watch them rise up from their respective stream beds to snap at your Rainforest Killer fly. And you couldn’t ask for a better cast than Peter Attenborough’s smooth voice-over in this segment from his 2006 Planet Earth series — search YouTube for "Cordyceps: Attack of the Killer Fungi." )

Of course everyone expected hideous footage of some poor soul’s fuzz-covered feet or infected lungs but — mending the line with a little bait-and-switch — the video actually treats them to some hideous footage of a variety of insects whose bodies and behavior get commandeered by a group of particularly nasty parasitic fungi.

So they’re hooked for the moment, having risen to the bait. Now what? While they’re still with you, time to bring in a selection of basic concepts with tongue-mangling names (reel out a bit of line introducing the main taxonomic groups sporting handles like Basidiomycota, God help us).

Now quick, while they’re swimming away, wrench 'em back in with an unexpected snap of the wrist. “Now of course the fungi are much more closely related to us than they are to plants.”

Wait … what?

Ken Baker is a retired professor of biology and environmental studies from Heidelberg University. If you have a natural history topic you would like Dr. Baker to consider for an upcoming column, please email your idea to fre-newsdesk@gannett.com.